1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a digital image compression method and inverse compression method which improves compression coding efficiency, and more particularly, is directed to a compression method in which the image is captured through a color filter array requiring a coding sequence suitable for efficiently encoding the image captured through the array
2. Description of the Related Art
Single chip color camera systems employ transform coding of the digital images or bandwidth compression prior to image transmission or storage to improve transmission or storage efficiency. In typical digital compression and transmission systems employing transform coding, the digital image is formatted into blocks and a spatial frequency transformation such as a Discrete Cosine Transform, DCT, or a visually weighted or Adaptive Discrete Cosine Transform (ADCT) is applied to each block to generate blocks of transform coefficients. The two-dimensional array of transform coefficients is conventionally encoded using a zig-zag scan sequence which scans along the diagonals of each block of coefficients. The combination of a color filter array with the zig-zag scanning pattern has resulted in a drastic reduction in the coding efficiency of the traditional Huffman and run length coding schemes used to code the transform coefficients and an improved scan sequence is needed.